


this new world

by Rigil_Kentauris



Category: Fire Emblem Heroes
Genre: 5 seconds of during canon but who's counting, Belonging, Canon-Typical Mentions of Suicide, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Lies and secrets, POV First Person, Past Zacharias | Bruno/Alfonse (Implied/Interpretable), Retrospective, and not belonging, and watching it fall apart, forming a relationship, pre canon - post canon, zacharias' mom is from our world AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-23 22:16:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16167956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rigil_Kentauris/pseuds/Rigil_Kentauris
Summary: It takes a lot to leave someone like you behind.It takes a lot to stay.





	this new world

**Author's Note:**

> 'zacharias' mom is from our world' is not a HC hill i would die on but its definitely one i would like. go have a nice picnic at.  
> also i have been debating with myself about the tags on this one since the day i posted it im

You catch me one day while I’m not paying attention.

“What’s that?” you say, pointing, a tone of curiosity making you sound lighter than usual.

Or maybe that's caused by the actual sunlight. The rays catch on the tiny, round, piece of worn bronzed metal in my hand. Even then dull glint is enough to send pain running through my heart.

_What’s that,_ you ask and I say the first thing on my mind, which is the truth.

“It’s a penny,” I say, stupidly.

You should know that my first instinct has never, _ever_   been to lie to you.

“What’s a penny?” you ask as you meander over to my side.

I close the disk quickly in my hand.

“Nothing,” I say. It must sound rough, judging my the way you freeze midstep.

“Nothing,” I repeat, though I take care to say it more softly this time. “Just...something out of an old story.”

“Oh,” you say.

You don’t move any closer to me.

I sigh.

“My apologies,” I tell you.

“A headache,” I lie.

“Again?” you ask.

Back then, I do not understand what these pains will mean for me.

“I’ll be fine."

Then I take your arm and lead you away from the light.

-

You catch me the next time because I am exhausted. I can’t see. I can’t see anything. My vision is black, then white, then red, pulsing in vibrant colors I would pay more attention to, if I could.

I can’t, of course. Every part of my head is filled with a spiked, uncontainable pressure.

I fumble around in my things, trying to feel by touch for the small woven wicker box. I know every dip of its surface. It should be easy to find.

My ears ring so badly that when I knock a stack of something or another over, I can’t hear the resulting crash.

You drop down to my side, wrap an arm around my shoulders, try to pull me from my course.

“What’s wrong?” you demand.

“Migraine,” I say, hoarsely. “Need… Have...”

Your hand catches one of mine, and the contact, the input, the extra demand on all my senses overwhelm. Fortunately, my free hand brushes against the surface of the box at the same time.

“Thank gods,” I whisper, not able to stop myself.

I don’t have the presence of mind to lie when you realize I can’t see right now. I don’t understand what I’m about to do to myself when you ask me which thing from the box that I need and I answer.

It’s only after, when everything is subsiding, that I realize what I’ve done.

I pull my feet up on the bed, and reach back for the nearest piled up blanket. Anything to hold on to, so long as it isn’t you.

You scoot further back from the edge and wait a minute for me to settle.

“What’s this?” you finally ask, holding up the little orange bottle and shaking it. There aren’t very many left. I don’t know what I’ll do when they’re gone. When I have to tell the healers how bad things are, to tell them how _often_ things are this bad.

“Naproxen,” I say.

It’s not much of an explanation, and you recognize this. I see it in the way you frown, but try to keep it from me.

“And what’s a...” You sound the word out slowly. “...mi...graine?”

The words sound so strange when they come from you.

“A bad headache,” I explain.

You look the bottle over before carefully replacing it in the box at your feet. I’ve messed the organization of it up badly, I see. Coins everywhere, the two Plastic pens scattered at angles. The Plastic cards thrown about and all in the wrong corners. Metal keychain toys. Tangled earbud strings. Folded papers and a broken comb and a gem-studded loop earring.

The other – empty – naproxen bottle.

“That’s not a Zenik language,” you say.

There’s no getting out of this, and yet still, I hesitate. “My mother was from another world,” I tell you.

“I thought you said she died when...”

Your voice trails off.

“I didn’t know her,” I add, as if this makes it any better. _My name is Zacharias. My parents are dead. I don’t know where I am._ It’s been my story since I was old enough to have one.

My lies.

This is the first lie you’ve caught me in. I try not to look at you. I don’t want to learn what you look like in a state of hurt confusion.

“You knew her well enough to learn the language,” you say.

And there is the second lie you’ve caught me in.

“Not all of it,” I say.

I distract you before you have the chance to challenge that new lie.

“She left me the box. Things from her world.”

I point at it.

“Penny,” you say.

“You remember?”

“Of course.”

We sit in silence. You on the edge of the bed, looking down at the mistake I’ve made in needing your help. I sit away from you, trapped in the middle, holding on to wool when I could be holding you.

“Naproxen is for migraine,” you say, eventually.

“That’s what she told me.”

You drop back onto the bed, gazing up at the ceiling.

“Well...” you say. “...okay. Okay, I can remember that.”

That’s all you say. I feel the tension in my shoulders tighten another notch. There’s a radiant ache beginning to spread there.

“Okay?” I repeat.

“Yes,” you say. “Okay.”

You stretch a hand back towards me, and hover it there until I grab it. You squeeze it, careful in how hard. Aware, I think, of how badly I was hurting only a little while ago.

“You haven’t told the healers yet, have you,” you guess.

“...No.”

“Well then,” you say. “Let’s go.”

You ignore my grumbles and halfhearted protests. You’ve set us to a task, and by gods, we’re going to do it.

But I’m lucky, I think.

At least it wasn’t the things from my father.

-

The third time you catch me is because I’m lonely. The campfire burns brightly tonight, but it’s so, so cold. It’s winter, yes, but it’s Embla cold rather than Askr cold today.

I sit outside, looking at the stars.

Remembering.

I know when you’ve awoken. I know things like that these days. I try not to think about just how much I’m aware of when it comes to your life signs. When it comes to Princess Sharena’s. The Queen’s. Every visiting so and so who takes you away from me for the day, by the demands of tradition and diplomacy.

You wake up and I feel the world change, like the wind switching directions.

You step outside your tent right at the moment I shiver in the cold. And I smile, sadly, because I know why you disappear back into your tent. You emerge again a moment later with several cloaks, and throw a heavy brown one around your shoulders before walking over and giving me yours.

You sit next to me, as always.

“Hey,” you say, and bump my shoulder with your own.

I reach for you and then let myself hold you. I don’t have the heart to tell you that the cloak’s going to do nothing for the chill I feel right now.

I don’t have to _tell_ you, though. I rest my head on your shoulder and wait for you to figure it out on your own. It only takes a minute for you to look at me, and then notice, and then touch my face and feel the dampness there.

I smile though it. You watch me, eyes wide, silenced by your surprise. I’ve never let you see me like this. I’ve never let you see me cry.

It’s important that I have at least one person who sees me like you do.

...but I’m so tired of being alone.

“She used to tell me the names of stars in her language,” I say. The starlight flickers in your eyes.

“Your mother?” you ask, stumbling over the words.

I nod.

“She’d draw pictures of them with embers on the hearth stones. They call them _constellations_ in her language. Told me that it used to drive my father insane.”

You nod this time, clearly not understanding.

But I try.

“She kept...kept looking. She kept trying to find any tracing that looked even vaguely similar to the things she remembered. She told me the mythology and she would point up there, looking. I think…she wanted to find some reminder of home.”

“And did she?”

The sky stretches infinite above. None of the realms in this world know just how infinite it truly is, even the Askrans, and their gatemakers.

Then again, all I have is the word of a woman who was branded a liar and a traitor, and left to die in the dark.

A liar, taking the word of a liar for absolute truth.

“She said,” I say, avoiding your gaze, “that her people believed endless worlds went around and around every single star out there. And that there were billions of stars, made long ago in an explosion that is destined to never cease. That long ago, all of the billions of stars lived in one point, one brilliant point of light where all the stars existed in harmony, but now, they’re scattered everywhere.”

You ponder this for a moment.

“All the stars in one place,” you say, dubiously. I laugh. “It sounds like Hell.”

I laugh harder.

And then I pull you closer, because I am a hypocrite, as well as a liar.

“Yes,” I agree. “It does.”

-

We’re traveling together one day, and I try to kill you.

And I begin to understand.

I try to kill you.

I try to kill myself.

I begin to understand.

You catch me the fourth time because I haven’t slept in days. Or so you say.

“You haven’t slept in days!” you shout, words sounding melted and hard to understand through the ringing warping din in my ears.

I throw another heavy, dusty tome across the table. It weighs nothing to me.

“Zacharias!” you shout. My name in your voice arcs through me. I double over, gasping. You touch my arm and I fall.

The convulsions are what alarm you, but really, they are what’s saving you.

I’ll always fight for you.

I shove you away, grab the table above me and drag myself back up.

“Leave me be!” I tell you, and when you move towards me anyway, I grab the nearest book and brandish it at you.

You plead something. I can no longer understand what you’re saying.

“No!” I bark.

You grab my wrist. The headache sings. In that moment training takes over, the reaction to being restrained by an enemy force, and the years of being terrified of getting caught. You grab my wrist and I turn the force back on you, twisting my hand around in yours to grab your lower arm instead, using my grip on you to pull you forward, spinning you and slamming you onto the surface of the desk. The book in my other hand is gone, dropped probably, and that arm I use to brace against the back of your neck, putting all of my weight on it, cutting off your breathing… cutting off your blood… I…

_Kill him,_ the voice in my head whispers.

“Leave me alone,” I beg it, weakly, all while the force bearing down on you strengthens. You’re struggling for breath, and some sick part of me enjoys the knowledge that you won’t be struggling for very long.

You mumble something. It’s not important. You make an effort to move, but I am stronger.

You keep on, incomprehensible syllables, and then you tense, as if you’ve realized something.

_Naproxen,_ you say, and my first thought, my first clear thought in days, really, is _I don’t have any._

You’re not waiting for a response, though. It’s almost a pale, breathless chant with you. _Penny, migraine, constellation. Naproxen_. _Penny, migraine. Constellation, naproxen._

It takes another precious few seconds before _I_ realize. Before I think back and realize I haven’t been speaking Askran to you.

The feeling of need and insistence dissolves immediately, leaving me shaking. The voice takes a moment’s pause to disdain me, then it leaves too.

With nothing else holding me up, I fall again.

I haven’t slept in days.

I welcome the darkness.

-

They trust me near weapons, still. It’s the only reason I find to get out of bed anymore. So I can laugh at the fact that they still trust me near weapons.

It takes a long time to acknowledge that I cannot leave anything behind.

There can be no trace of me. Nothing that can be used against me. Nothing that can betray me when I have to reinvent my identity again.

I tell myself that’s the reason my mother’s things have to be destroyed, at any rate.

Plastic doesn’t burn easily, I learn. But it does burn, eventually.

I watch and then, the next time they trust me near weapons and battles and _you,_ I run.

-

Sometimes I wonder if you think about how heavy your sword must have felt at my neck.

-

Sometimes I wonder if you don’t think about it.

-

Kiran is bleeding out. You touch their face with such regard, trace the line of their cheekbone, kiss their forehead gently and tell them, over and over, that they will be okay.

They won’t. Even when their body heals.

But I don’t say this. I don’t have any right to be jealous of the way you’ll _make_ them alright. The way you’ll defy all of reason in order to help them. The way they will, in fact, be okay.

You’ll make sure of it.

And I make sure my sister is okay. She too, will heal. The burn coating her arm will heal, as will the fury and pain of being injured so deliberately and cruelly. We have experience being tortured, we two.

Her friend, too, will be okay. Veronica sits next to her in stony silence, with a grimace that manages to grow every time Ylgr says a single word. But I know enough of how my sister is and how the rattling voices in our heads makes us feel so isolated, to know that it won’t be long before she starts talking back to the Niflian princess.

I make sure they’re fine, and I’m walking over to you, when we realize Kiran is bleeding out.

And then it’s chaos.

People shout about internal bleeding and healers blaze by with glowing staves and a host of heroes crowd around and run around and generally wreak havoc. Kiran’s phone falls out of their fingers when they are picked up and brought away to the medic’s part of the one-time battlefield. No one else notices it. Or maybe they do, but underrate how easily glass can be destroyed.

Kiran’s phone is not at all like my mother described the devices. For one, it is small, smaller than I could have ever imagined. For two, it is almost entirely screen. Smooth almost to the point of soft. It’s flat, as well. It looks more like her description of a palm pilot than anything.

It’s odd, and the realization stuns me. I now know something about my mother’s world that she never did, or ever will. And that’s why you catch me for the fifth time. Kiran has run back in a tizzy, shouting, with you and Princess Sharena and Commander Anna scrambling after them.

“WHERE IS IT!?” they shout. “MY PHOOOOOOONE!”

“Here,” I say, without thinking.

It’s not even you who catches the slip, at first. It’s not even ‘at first’ that I get caught. It takes a full few minutes before I hear Kiran shout, then see them marching back over towards me with a bevy of healers in their wake. You are tromping along, sighing, trying to stop them more for the sake of it than any hope that they’ll see reason.

I smile without meaning to.

“ _ **YOU!”**_   Kiran shouts, and I feel the danger in the word.

I stop smiling, without meaning to.

_“YOU YLGR BASTARD!”_ Kiran shouts, the meaning behind that particular statement not quite clear. Then they add: _“HOW THE_ FUCK _DID YOU KNOW WHAT A PHONE WAS?”_

And that is plenty clear enough.

They’re right. There’s no reason I should know what that is, yet.

And yet.

They’re right, and by the look in their eye, they know it. By the increasingly triumphant bouncing from one foot to another, they know that I know it.

“OH!” they shout, louder than ever. “BOOM, BABEY! I _KNEW_   IT! ALFONSE-”

They turn, but you’re gone.

-

I always know where to find you.

Not least of all because the pain starts to radiate in stiff pulses whenever I get near.

You’re sitting on a patch of burned out grass, under the husk of a burned out tree. The inside is hollow, home only to more ash and dust. You’ve kept the cloak and feathers, though you must be burning up in the Múspell heat. Most of your outfit is singed black, too.

Marks of the fight to defeat the dragon blooded monster that is Surtr and his Múspellian generals.

I don’t sit.

The days where I was free to be beside you are long, long gone, I know.

I don’t sit and you don’t offer to let me.

“You’re from Kiran’s world,” you say.

Your voice is flat.

“I don’t know,” I say, honestly. “I recognize _some_ things about them-”

“The language?”

“...I don’t know,” I say, less honestly. Whatever magic Breidblik has translates most of Kiran’s vocabulary.

Most.

I wince. I can’t get over lying to you about this, it seems.

“A lot of the curses, yes,” I admit.

“You should have told me,” you say.

“I didn’t know-”

“ _You should have told me,”_ you repeat, fiercely, snapping your gaze to me. “You knew. You _always_ knew.”

“I-”

“How long?” you demand.

I blink. I don’t think I’ve seen you angry, before. Even when Gustav...that was just sadness. Or when I told you I’d killed...me. But I can’t remember how you looked then. The curse poisons every memory it gets hold of.

“How long what?” I ask.

“How long?” you repeat. You grab on to your knees a little tighter. “If…if the curse hadn’t… How long would you have let me believe?”

I want to answer. For the first time in my life I want to answer.

For the first time in my life I don’t know what you want.

It isn’t me.

I’m scared that what you want isn’t me.

“I don’t understand,” I say, wanting more than anything to reach out and touch you.

“No,” you agree, bitterly. “You don’t.”

You push yourself to your feet, and dust yourself off.

“Excuse me, Prince Bruno,” you say, and walk off.

I’ve never let you see me cry. Barring once, barring once when I slipped up because I was lonely and afraid.

I’m not going to make it twice tonight.

No one comes looking for me.

But it’s good that it should be this way.

-

The war stretches on. One thinks it would end, but there’s always a reason.

-

And then there isn’t.

-

And then you come face to face with your worst fear.

-

They’re leaving.

They’re leaving _you._

There are tears on your face as you try and convince Kiran to stay. You can’t say anything they haven’t already told themselves. I know. I’ve been there.

“I’m sorry,” is all Kiran says. “I’m so sorry.”

I don’t think you really notice where I am right now. I’d care about that fact, but it’s been too long. Everything I felt for you has consolidated into a dull, dense sore spot that I can ignore, if I try hard. And by now, I have more experience ignoring pain than I would have ever believed possible, when I was younger.

I stand behind Kiran. It will be where I am when I slip up for the last time, in your mind. The last memory you’ll have of me. But you’ll need someone to blame for the way Kiran is about to take half your heart with them. And if I can give you that…

If I can give you _anything_ after everything that’s happened…

Well. I’m tired of failing you.

I refuse to do so again.

I will _never_ fail you again.

…though you won’t see it as such.

“Kiran,” I say, gently. “It’s time to go.”

Your eyes tear from them to me. It’s so much easier to blame me for taking them than it is to blame them for leaving.

Isn’t it?

It must be, because your eyes harden with the shortest flash of hatred before they fade to betrayal and fury.

This time, I make sure I look you in the eyes,

This time, I need to know what you look like.

“We have to,” I tell Kiran, though I’m looking at you.

You’re shaking. Confusion and hurt.

And it kills me, because, for the first time...it’s the only truth that is important.

I have to go.

This has never been home.

This has never been true.

It’s never been _real,_ even.

“I don’t understand,” you say.

You’re rooted to the spot. As if moving would break whatever delicate balance there is, as if you moving would mean that time is moving as well, bringing us all ever closer to the point where there is no more time for Kiran and you.

For you and I.

For all of us.

I hold the singed penny in my hand a little tighter.

“Goodbye, Alfonse,” I tell you, and without hesitating any further, I step through the gate.

I do not wait for Kiran. To tell the truth, I cannot honestly be certain they will leave you.

It takes a lot to leave someone like you behind.

It takes a lot to stay.

I step out, and this new world is…

Warm, for one. Bright and sunny, and loud. Louder than any battlefield, with loud blaring tones and machinery grinding and heavy rumbling from the sky and talking and talking and _talking._

Everyone is talking, it seems.

I smile. I don’t mean to, I don’t even know how I _can,_ right now. I feel as if all I want to do is curl up somewhere and sleep until the choking feeling of sadness leaves me.

But I smile, nonetheless.

I am here.

I am home.

And hopefully, for the first time…

We are both of us, free.


End file.
